Author
Topic: Resident Evil 6

As a resident evil title, I am disappointed. It's not scary at all anymore, the fright factor is gone. It's a shame, even the cheap thrills feel have no real fear inducing effect. I mean christ, enemies are on the floor and inactive, and you trip over them as you walk. It's as bad as smash brothers brawl's stupid ass tripping. Chris's scenario was so action paced it didn't have any feel of impending doom at all. You wanted to rush forward and just destroy shit....

Which leads me to my actual opinion. The new controls are astounding, if a bit difficult to get used to at first. Reminded me of going from MGS3 to MGS4. It feels familiar, but so much more to it. It actually reminded me of mgs4 with the rolling and prone fire. Running in as Chris and just shooting everything in so many ways... I was in my glory. The new melee tactics are impressive too, like Leon's awesome bulldog, and the facesmash against walls and fences. The new controls are a huge step in the right direction. They SERIOUSLY need to fix cover though. It's far too flaky as it stands, sometimes you go in, most of the time you eat a shitstorm of bullets. The qte you saw in yggdrasil's video is sort of misleading, it's actually not so silly, you're choosing directions to look in and find the keys, not just run through predetermined motions in a set time limit. More qte's like that would be nice, like if a large enemy grabbed you and you had to aim your knifr at a weak point to stab instead of just mashing your controller like a fiend to get out of its grip, similarly to dead space.

Alright, I'm very opinionated after playing the RE6 demo. Here's some background:

-I love Resident Evil-I love, love, love RE4-I have no problem with the series moving away from horror, though I would still prefer to see a return to the series' roots-RE5 was like RE4 but without any original ideas and the co-op actually took away from the entire experience

Okay. I think RE6 (based on the demo, admittedly) is an absolute disaster. The controls are somewhat improved over RE5 (thank God I can move and shoot now), but the QTEs feel forced, the melee attacks are completely unreliable and yet critical to the gameplay, the shooting controls are terribly inaccurate (though you can apparently improve your aiming ability with skill points) and having X do just about everything in the game creates some awkward moments where I try to run but end up quick turning. Why not just give us Dead Space style controls and be done with it? And what the hell is up with the cover mechanic? Is it that hard to ripoff Gears of War?

Then there's the graphics. I swear, this game looks worse than RE4 on the GC. Not only are the graphics so dark you can't see anything unless you set your gamma setting to max, but the zombies all look like shit with awful textures and hideous modeling. Then there's the game's atrocious framerate, which chugs along like the PS3 is trying to render Crysis on max settings.

I could live with all of that, but the game is just not fun. The Leon sections shows the most promise with some actual sense of place, immersion and suspense, but Chris and Jake just feel like shit Call of Duty knockoffs with piss poor controls. I'm honestly mystified with how bad this game plays considering almost all of Capcom is working on this title. Dead Space 2 is more fun, looks better, and plays better than RE6. Every video for DS3 has me more excited, and it looks like they are trying to create a solid singleplayer experience to compliment the co-op campaign (and hopefully they pull it off *fingers crossed).

I was all ready for RE6, but playing the game forced it all the way to the back of my mind and out the other side. No clue what Capcom thinks they're doing, but I won't be along for this ride.

Yeah, I (and many others it seems) feel similarly. A lot would probably be helped if they simply didn't focus so blindly on popular trends: either dump the co-op angle or better yet use your fucking separate campaigns to deliver distinctive gameplay experiences, like making one or two of them single player focused and the remaining one(s) co-op focused, and not save the sole single player one for an unlockable reward. It feels like you might have a really good game if you scrapped the other two and focused purely on making Leon's scenario as good as you could, but as is it's just a weird, over ambitious mess that stays conservative in the worst ways.

Man, I can't get over how generically modern war-themed Chris's scenario is. What in the fuck?

I gave the demo a bash, played through the Leon portion and I'm horribly disappointed. Its so obviously focused on co-op that it barely feels like I should be playing this solo. The AI seems OK, but in the long run I hate having to rely on an AI controlled ally and RE is something best played alone. Speaking of RE, this barely feels like Resident Evil any more. I assumed this would be the big temptation for my Capcom boycott, at the moment I cant say that it is. Maybe the Chris or Jake scenarios will change my mind.

Seriously, go back and look at RE4. The game still looks good. It's one of the best looking games of last console generation. RE6 looks dark, drab and boring by comparison. Play through the night section of the village (rain and all) and then the RE6 demo again. RE4 also runs at a stable framerate, something that seven years worth of innovation at Capcom seems to have missed.

Don't you love how you can't shoot the zombies on the ground until they magically come back to life? That's next gen, people! What about the fact that Leon can't move a fucking lawn chair that's been cemented to the ground.

One of the first things I noticed was how the framerate just didn't feel as smooth, I think this is one of those 20-30 FPS games rather than staying at a stable 30 FPS. And I'm getting very, very tired of seeing that crap on consoles, maybe it's because of how long the generation's gone on and they want to push more graphical power, but I really feel like that's one of those things that should've been fully resolved this gen, at least for the bigger games. And now that I think about it I kind of want to see the HD RE4 for contrast, it really may look better in ways other than FPS.

RE4 did look great for its time, and still holds up well today. The problem is that the game just doesn't feel like RE any more. The co-op will probably kill any exploration that was left in the "over the shoulder" generation of Resident games. All you're left with is a linear co-op slaughterfest set in the RE Universe. At times it felt like I was playing a rail shooter. It is just a demo, maybe the game opens up later on, but somehow I doubt it.

I'm a nitpicker, but how can you say the controls were awkward? Functionality haa been vastly improved, the speed is overall faster, the melee combat handled incredibly well once you figured it out (initial melee is a stun, similarly to shooting a knee or shoulder in RE4 and 5, followups were instant kills). I don't see a problem with x being the everything button, it's far better than wasting a button for something as trivial as readying the knife. I agree that the cover system is complete shit, and I doubt it's gonna be fixed, but I barely used it anyway. Sure Chris' campaign felt like a scene out of CoD, but blame that on the people of the world being mindless zombies (see what I did there?).